Obama consistently posed the same question Ronald Reagan asked in a landmark television commercial from his winning re-election campaign in 1984, “Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?”

Vice President candidate Paul Ryan once remarked, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. And at the Rand celebration he spoke at in 2005, Ryan invoked the central theme of Rand’s writings when he told his audience, “Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill… is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict – individualism versus collectivism.”